shows no sense above him, but in such practices, shall be esteemed in his senses, and possibly may pretend to the guardianship of him who is no ways his inferior, but in being less wicked?  We see old age brings us indifferently into the same impotence of soul, wherein nature has placed this lord.  There is something very fantastical in the distribution of civil power and capacity among men.  The law certainly gives these persons into the ward and care of the Crown, because that is best able to protect them from injuries, and the impositions of craft and knavery; that the life of an idiot may not ruin the entail of a noble house, and his weakness may not frustrate the industry or capacity of the founder of his family.  But when one of bright parts, as we say, with his eyes open, and all men’s eyes upon him, destroys those purposes, there is no remedy.  Folly and ignorance are punished!  Folly and guilt are tolerated!  Mr. Locke has somewhere made a distinction between a madman and a fool:[394] a fool is he that from right principles makes a wrong conclusion; but a madman is one who draws a just inference from false principles.  Thus the fool who cut off the fellow’s head that lay asleep, and hid it, and then waited to see what he would say when he awakened and missed his headpiece, was in the right in the first thought, that a man would be surprised to find such an alteration in things since he fell asleep; but he was a little mistaken to imagine he could awake at all after his head was off.  A madman fancies himself a prince; but upon his mistake, he acts suitably to that character; and though he is out in supposing he has principalities, while he drinks gruel, and lies in straw, yet you shall see him keep the port of a distressed monarch in all his words and actions.  These two persons are equally taken into custody:  but what must be done to half this good company, who every hour of their life are knowingly and wittingly both fools and madmen, and yet have capacities both of forming principles, and drawing conclusions, with the full use of reason?”

From my own Apartment, July 11.

This evening some ladies came to visit my sister Jenny; and the discourse, after very many frivolous and public matters, turned upon the main point among the women, the passion of love.[395] Sappho, who always leads on this occasion, began to show her reading, and told us, that Sir John Suckling and Milton had, upon a parallel occasion, said the tenderest things she had ever read.  “The circumstance,” said she, “is such as gives us a notion of that protecting part which is the duty of men in their honourable designs upon, or possession of, women.  In Suckling’s tragedy of ‘Brennoralt’ he makes the lover steal into his mistress’s bedchamber, and draw the curtains; then, when his heart is full of her charms, as she lies sleeping, instead of being carried away by the violence of his desires into thoughts of a warmer nature, sleep, which is the image of death, gives this generous lover reflections of a different kind, which regard rather her safety than his own passion.  For, beholding her as she lies sleeping, he utters these words: